To Paraphrase the Unparaphrasable
David Lodge's Literary Criticism

A ReaderSelected and edited byLidia Vianu

The Unparaphrasable?

Paraphrase: 'Express meaning of (passage) in other words.' (OED)

In order to make the present selection, I spent a summer reading David Lodge's books of literary criticism all over again, and have found them as theoretical as ever, and yet perfectly 'teachable'studentfriendly, to use a neologism that belongs to an area of information which has shaped the minds of the present young generation.
I admit I compiled this selection as a guide for my own students at the University of Bucharest, most of them lost in the maze of coinages repeated with gusto by some literary critics of our times.
Can one be theoretical and clear at the same time?
There is no doubt that literary criticism means a lot more than the statement 'What a lovely book!'. There is no doubt that a literary critic must use theoretical tools. Are these tools any use unless they really fit the text under discussion? How does one make them fit?
When the literary critic's mind is set on Cultural Studies, how far should this critic be allowed to stray away from the work under discussion?
These are the questions I was asking myself while making the present selection. I was looking for an answer.
'Fashion' used to be tyrannical. If, at some point in history, you failed to wear a wig when everybody else was wearing it, you were described as 'bizarre', a misfit. Right now, the unwritten laws of literary criticism seem to follow the old pattern of 'fashion'. When he wrote My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism's Hidden Hero (1987), Malcolm Bradbury must have sensed that.
I have chosen a critic who was a close friend of Malcolm Bradbury's, and who writes books that are both theoretical and yet perfectly accessible at the same time.
The title for this selection comes, in fact, from David Lodge himself. The excerpt runs as follows:
'It is the inevitable irony of our position as critics that we are obliged, whatever kind of imaginative work we examine, to paraphrase the unparaphrasable.'

Lidia Vianu

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